On day 1 we talked about how your nervous system feeds your brain information. And how your brain is slower than your nervous system. Which means it often gets overwhelmed by all the information your nervous system collects. Because it has to organize all this information in the library of your brain. Your nervous system is like the internet with incredible speed. Where the library in your brain is powerful, but much slower.
Finding a book in a library takes a lot longer than doing a search on the internet. So we have to give our brain time to catch up. There are countless ways to give your brain these breaks, so you can remain calm. But one of the quickest and easiest ways is to do rapid eye movements. This is where you hold your head still while moving your eyes from side to side over and over, until you feel calm. This only takes 10 to 30 seconds. Your brain is slower than your nervous system, but they both do incredible things pretty quickly.
On day 2, we talked about how there is more information in the world than ever before. And how your nervous system cannot filter information. It is like a hoader and it collects everything it can get it’s hands on. While your brain is the one who has to deal with all this collected information and organize it. We all create a library in our brain filled with the information your nervous system collects. And your value as a human is often dictated by the value of the library you create in your brain.
You can spend a lifetime creating a junkyard of irrelevant and useless information if you do not learn how to filter information. This means you have to learn how to prioritize the information you need and what will be useful. Your nervous system is like a black friday shopper at 5am when the store just opens. It grabs everything blindly and in a frenzy. Where your brain is the curator who has to pause and say will this bring value to your library. If you stress your brain out by overworking it, then you won’t be able to create a quality product. And this product is you.
Knowing where to focus and what is important to you is the key. Your nervous system collects everything. But your brain has to be taught to filter information. If you collect everything, you will create a junkyard. But collecting only valuable information will make you a valuable human.
This means you can’t play keep up with the Jones without it costing you everything. When you start to value everything everyone around you values your library pays the price. And your end product gets watered down. That end product is you. You are your library. If you allow other people to dictate what is valuable information then we all become the same watered down product that lacks depth and direction. You will spend your life in the darkness of the tunnel rather than having tunnel vision and going towards the light. That light is you.
So today, on day 3, let’s talk about how to know yourself. Everyone agrees that it is important to know yourself, but how do you actually get to know yourself? No one ever really explains how you are supposed to get to know yourself. But how would you get to know someone else? Pretty much all the same rules apply.
When you try to get to know someone else you spend time with them. Literally, getting to know them. So you need to spend time with yourself in order to know who you are and what is important to you. And you need to know what is important to you, so your brain can build the library you need filled with important ingredients and information. Knowing yourself is what dictates what is important to you.
Being like everyone else is going to cause you to collect information like everyone else. And when you have the same information as everyone else, you lack orginal ideas. Your value comes from your ability to be unique and create new ideas. Sure, your value is dependent on a lot of steps after those unique ideas. But if you lack the unique ideas the rest of the steps are nonexistent. And your going to be stuck doing things like everyone else and carrying out their ideas.
You don’t need unique ideas in everything. You only need one really good unique idea in your lifetime in order to have overwhelmingly abundant value. Your value is going to be directly correlated with your ability to innovate. Life is no longer about collecting information. We all have access to information nowadays. Now your value is about filtering that information and organizing it in new ways.
In order to find that one unique idea that will revolutionize the world, you have to brainstorm a lot. Get comfortable with putting information together in different ways and not having it work. Because the more abstract you get, the more you learn, and the more likely you are to find that unique idea. We all agree that fried chicken is not a unique idea. But someone thought of fried chicken and waffles and that was a unique idea.
Let your brain wander without judgement. Your brain is like those paintings where you have to unfocus your eyes to see the picture. Judging yourself and being critical isn’t how to see the picture or create unique ideas.
Let yourself be without judgment. This is how you get to know someone else well. You allow them to be around you without judgement. You let them be themselves. So you have to learn to let yourself be you. Stop picking and criticizing yourself and just be. When you spend time with yourself just being, this is when you really get to know who you are. You are not the things you prefer or like. You are a being. Knowing yourself is about knowing how you like to be. And I’m sure you have a lot of different ways of being. Find the ways you like being and do more of those.
Follow your joy. Do things that bring you joy and things you enjoy. Life is about being in joy. When you are in joy you will find your true self. That is who you really are. And never judge the things that bring you joy unless they hurt someone else. That is the only rule about joy. Anything is on the table as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. When your joy involves hurting someone else that means your brain is operating dysfunctionally and you need to fix it.
Joy is about just being. Sure, you can be in joy with others around. Or you can be in joy alone. But being in this state of joy without judging yourself or criticizing yourself is how you learn who you are. You are not the things you like. You are a being. Those things you like are just a way to facilitate a way you like to be.
The more you spend time in joy, the more you learn about who you are. And the more you know who you are, the more you are able to filter information about what is important to you. The better you filter information on what is important to you and the more you know about who you are and how you like to be, the more you become clear on your purpose in this life here on Earth.
Everyone was sent to Earth with a purpose. And you were given skills and gifts to help you accomplish this purpose. Spending time just being in joy without judgement or criticism is how you find not only who you are and your skills and gifts. But it is how you find your purpose on Earth. No one was sent here to be like everyone else. Sure we may all make fried chicken in similar ways. But frying chicken is not what everyone was sent here to Earth to do. A couple people were probable sent to fry chicken. But that means most of you all have a different purpose here on Earth.
Spend time in joy getting to know who you are and you will find your skills and gifts. These will lead you to your purpose here on Earth.